Win McNamee/Getty ImagesRepublican presidential candidate and former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich (L) and his wife Callista Gingrich (R) wait back stage while being introduced for a Town Hall meeting at Sun City's Magnolia Hall today January in Bluffton, South Carolina. Texas Gov. Rick Perry announced this morning that he is withdrawing from the race for the Republican nomination prior to the South Carolina primary and endorsing Gingrich.

Rick Perry said today he's dropping out of the race and handing the reins over to his endorsement pick: Newt Gingrich.

This is a man, Perry said, who is a "conservative visionary" — an interesting description, since most definitions of "visionary" also include words like "illusory."

Gingrich has long traveled the country espousing family values and dispensing moral advice. Yet so often, the Newt of his dreams gets tramped on by the Newt of reality. There's simply too much difference between what he preaches and what he actually does.

Apparently, the most Christian thing Perry could say about that today was, “Newt is not perfect, but who among us is?"

Yet the problem is not that Newt is not perfect. The problem is that Newt is a hypocrite. We've seen this in his attacks on other candidates — such as his criticism of Mitt Romney for his role in the buyout industry. "I'm proud of real capitalists," Gingrich said, but private equity work, he huffed, "is not venture capital."

Then there was his earlier denunciation of Freddie Mac for the collapse of the housing market, and assertion that Rep. Barney Frank, a Democrat from Massachusetts, should be jailed for his association with "a lobbyist who was close to Freddie Mac." In 2008, Gingrich also demanded President Obama give back any money his campaign received from Freddie Mac executives.